(The Subversive Copy Editor)
(The Subversive Copy Editor)
A great many common abbreviations* behave perfectly well in any fiction or nonfiction context, including dialogue, when the general guidelines in CMOS are observed: Mr., Ms., CEO, p.m., PhD, UFO. Editors should have no quarrel with them, as long as they’re styled…
Your author website probably has a nice banner image, and if you blog, you probably look online for eye-catching artwork to illustrate or decorate your posts or pages. Maybe your About page features a professional headshot or images from book…
Short answer: Yes. Now and then, a writer or editor asks our online Q&A whether mentioning a brand name in a work of fiction requires permission or the addition of the trademark (™) or registered (®) symbol. Fortunately, in works…
Those of you who use social media are used to seeing comments from sticklers who object to any deviation from the grammar rules they learned. The following sentences would not likely pass their inspection. Can you tell why?
Sentence 1. At the donut shop she had trouble getting her order out.
Sentence 2. Hopefully, none of the donuts are gone.
Sentence 3. But etiquette forced me to share the donuts.
In 2013, after a few years of writing essays here for copyeditors and writers, I stopped posting—mainly out of a fear of repeating myself. You were so good to keep coming back! I didn’t want to bore you. Meanwhile,
I had a bad week recently and found myself getting behind on my main editing project (“Trade book: Must Not Slide!”). Unscheduled chores kept landing in my in box. As the week progressed and I became more and more grumpy and panicky, I started making mistakes, which only added more work and stress.
"Manual of Style: Being a Compilation of Rules in Force at the University of Chicago Press, To Which Are Appended Specimens of Types in Use." Such was titled the first published edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, printed in 1906.
A few years ago I visited the creepy but fascinating Voodoo Museum in New Orleans. I didn’t need to take the tour in order to believe in curses. I myself live under two that I know of. The first one…
My long-time colleague Joseph G. Peterson is also a novelist whose first book, Beautiful Piece, was published last year by Northern Illinois University Press in their Switchgrass imprint. The book is a stunner, pulling the reader straight into the troubled…
It’s clear from the chatter online that many of you already have the sixteenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style, and that you love it. But, you know, at some point you’re going to have to open it. Cracking…